DENVER – One of the trickiest lessons of baseball making it an excruciatingly difficult game to master is knowing the difference between when a bad result means a change to the processes required and when it does not.
For Colorado Rockies starter Jon Gray, Monday night’s drubbing at the hands of the San Diego Padres fit firmly into the latter category.
“I felt really good. I felt like I had my stuff,” he said after a five-inning performance that saw him give up seven runs on 10 hits, including a homer to his opposite. “Besides a couple of pitches, I felt like it was a really well-pitched game. There were a lot of soft singles, I know, but a couple bad pitches can cost you. I felt like overall we threw the ball well.”
He certainly did at first, striking out the side in order to begin the game. He even ended up with six punchouts to one walk, showing flashes throughout the contest of his usual, Padre-dominating self. And while there is plenty to work on, Colorado’s most talented pitcher isn’t going back to the drawing board over a game like that.
“I can say right now it’s a fluke,” he says. Then he pauses for a brief moment and repeats himself: “I can say right now it’s a fluke. Stuff like that doesn’t happen all the time.”
He’s referring to a three-run home run off the bat of his counterpart, Clayton Richard.
And he’s right. Even though he admits to missing his spot.
“Just a pitch up.”
He wanted it down.
“If it would have been down, we would have been fine. That’s all I had to do was throw a fastball down. But I didn’t get it there and it cost me.”
So even though he is correct in that, more often than not those kinds of mistakes are not punished so harshly, there is still a lesson to be learned here.
Manager Bud Black agreed that Gray ran into some misfortune but sees a specific adjustment that must be made.
“Those were soft hits in the second,” he said. “But in the middle part of the game, it got away from him, for sure. That’s something that we’ll address; that we gotta keep the focus from pitch one to his very last pitch; to locate the ball.” If you don’t, the former pitcher says, “big league hitters will make you pay.”
The message was already beginning to sink in as Gray repeated that phrase nearly verbatim just a few moments later.
“I can’t throw lazy pitches,” he says. “Everything’s gotta be 100 percent from the first pitch to the last.”
Accurately pinpointing a problem is almost always step one toward fixing it.
If the gameplan wasn’t the problem. Don’t change the gameplan. If the pitch sequencing wasn’t the problem, don’t alter your pitch sequencing. There’s certainly no need to talk about his mechanics.
“I’m still not getting away from anything,” says Gray. That’s pitcher-speak for “I’m not making any dramatic changes.”
Instead, Gray says he needs to “refine” his mental approach. “I just gotta be better,” he says. “I just gotta get back at it. I don’t feel like we took a giant step back. I really don’t.”
As for all the excuse-me-hits and bloopers that set the stage for his start to unravel? “Those are frustrating but those don’t beat you,” he says. “It really all came down to two bad pitches.”
